The Legacy Quest Trilogy

by Unknown Author

  “Our alliance is a temporary one,” Ororo reminded him, “forged by necessity. It will last only until Moira, Heniy and the others have completed their work.”

  Shaw sighed, “And you, like your friend Mr, Drake, are only here to ensure that I uphold my side of the bargain: that, if and when a cure does become available, the Hellfire Club will not have sole control over its use.”

  “Precisely.”

  “So we have been forced together, you and I. Does that mean we cannot at least be civil to each other; cannot help each other to pass the time?” Shaw raised an eyebrow and his lips curled into a wicked smile. “You only remain on this island to watch me, Ororo. As long as you continue to avoid my company, you cannot claim to be doing your job veiy well.”

  She regarded him with a hostile expression for a long moment as the rain sliced down between them. Then she said: “Stand aside, Shaw. I would like to diy out inside.”

  He stepped out of her way, indicating the hatchway behind him with an extravagant gesture. Storm swept past him without another glance in his direction, disappearing through the aperture and down the steps beyond. As soon as she was out of the Black King’s sight, the polite smile froze into a sneer on his face and his dark eyes hardened.

  Sebastian Shaw was a realist. He knew that there was still a long way to go if he was ever to make Ororo Munroe his ally. But she hadn’t turned down his offer this time.

  The image in Selene’s crystal ball faded as the Beast succumbed to unconsciousness again. She lowered it back onto its dais by force of mind alone and sat back against her velvet cushions, her pale brow furrowed in thought.

  There was no love lost between her and Shaw. She had allied herself with him in the past, but only when it had proved expedient to do so. However, she knew that somebody like him might prove useful again in the future. She also knew that he would make a powerful enemy. Therefore, she had stopped short of opening outright hostilities against him.

  Now, however, she had set her sights upon a prize that made the risk worth taking.

  Blackheart had appeared at her side-attracted perhaps, as he often seemed to be, by her thoughts of dark ambition. She had neither heard nor sensed his approach: the demon’s earthly form appeared to be sculpted from stone, but he could come and go like a shadow.

  “Shaw almost has it,” said Selene. “A cure to the Legacy Virus.” Her Black King regarded her in confident silence, his eyes ablaze in their sockets. “I wonder what he intends to do with it...” she mused. “Oh, I’ve no doubt that it will figure in one of his many master plans. He will find a way of using it to further his own ambitions .. *

  “But you could utilize the cure more ... effectively.”

  “Precisely!” Selene’s lips twisted into a grin at the compliment. “Shaw has already allowed the X-Men to tie his hands. He was foolish to involve them in this game.”

  “Even had he not,” rumbled Blackheart, “he does not possess your vision, my Queen.”

  “No,” purred Selene. “Nor does he have the courage to change this world as I would.”

  “This prize would be better suited to your care, I think.”

  “I cannot help but agree.”

  “There are many who would give much for the smallest drop of such a serum. Their desperation, their fear of death, makes for an exquisite concoction.”

  “As you say, Blackheart, the possibilities for corruption are quite delicious.”

  “I only regret that I cannot accompany you to the island,” said Blackheart. Selene listened for the merest hint of irritation in his voice, but heard none. He must have found the spell that bound him to this building irksome to say the least, but he rarely showed any sign of frustration at his predicament. She supposed that, for a demon of his power and longevity, it was easy to be patient. The binding of his corporeal form to one place for a few fleeting years was a minor inconvenience—especially if this was where he wished to be.

  “Oh, I don’t think either of us needs dirty our hands,” she said. “A few lesser demons should be adequate for this task.”

  “Are you certain of that? You consider this Shaw a resourceful foe.”

  “Shaw’s greatest talent is for making prudent alliances,” said Selene. “His greatest failing is that he can rarely keep them. Not for the first time, his Inner Circle is crumbling around him.”

  “And the X-Men?"

  “Little more than children,” said Selene with contempt, “and their deal with Shaw means that only three of them stand in the way of our goal. Of those three, only the weather witch, Storm, poses any threat to us. The Beast is in no condition to fight anybody, and Iceman has never had the courage or the intellect to realize his true potential.”

  Blackheart nodded. “Then I shall summon our troops, my lady.”

  One year later:

  WHAT HAVE you done to us, Selene?” snapped Cyclops. The question sounded inadequate in his ears, so he asked another,

  _more pertinent one. “And where’s our teammate?”

  Only seconds earlier, victory had been in sight. The X-Men, with an unlikely ally in the person of Sebastian Shaw, had broken into the New York mansion house headquarters of the Hellfire Club in search of a kidnapped friend. After several trials—some of which Cyclops didn’t even like to think about—they had reached the Black Queen’s basement throne room. But even as he had thrown open the final door between his team and their goal, the world had turned black around him.

  For an instant between two footsteps-an instant that had seemed at the time like an eternity but which now felt like the blink of an eyelid in his memory—he had been moving in slow-motion, his bewildered teammates picked out in negative around him.

  And then the moment had ended, and Cyclops had lurched back into the real world-to find that everything had changed.

  “Your friend?” repeated Selene, furrowing her brow in mock confusion but unable to suppress a telltale smile. “Ah, yes, you came here in search of Doctor Henry McCoy, the Beast. How easy to forget after all this time.” Now she wore an equally insincere expression of sympathy. “I am sorry to inform you that the Beast is dead.”

  “If that’s true,” growled Wolverine, coiled like the spring of a loaded firearm and inching forward, “you’re gonna wish you could join him.” His eyes were still wild with the adrenaline high of battle: a high that threatened to make him lose control. His bearing was reminiscent of that of the creature after which he was named—and with his yellow and blue costume tom to expose his hirsute chest, he seemed somehow more animalistic than ever.

  Cyclops shot him a warning look. He wanted to delay combat for as long as he could. He was well aware of the dozens of demons lined up behind Selene’s throne; most of all, he was aware of Blackheart, who had already put the X-Men through so much. He was beginning to realize what must have happened, and it left his team at a big disadvantage. They needed, at least, to learn more about this new, unexpected situation before they acted.

  Selene flicked back her long, black hair and chuckled to herself. “Oh, do please excuse my amusement,” she said, “it has been a long time since anybody has dared speak to me in such a manner. I have to say, I find it quite refreshing.”

  Another of the X-Men stepped forward. Her red hair was disheveled, and one sleeve of her green and gold costume with its distinctive firebird motif on the chest had been shredded. A purple bruise stood out on her exposed forearm. Still, to Cyclops, the woman presented nothing less than an image of perfect beauty. Her name was Jean Grey Summers, but she was also known as Phoenix. She was his wife, and the love of his life.

  “You’re obviously itching to tell us something, Selene,” said Phoenix. “Why don’t you just get on with it?”

  “If you insist.” Selene’s tongue flicked out of her mouth to moisten her red lips. She was relishing the moment, enjoying the expressions on the faces of her audience. “You believe that only a few minutes have passed since you faced Blackheart and my demons on the lower levels of th
is building and in the catacombs beneath them. You are wrong. My throne room, you see, was not undefended. I had the foresight to mark its door with a series of powerful magical glyphs—invisible to your eyes, of course. When you raced in here, so eager to save your friend and dispense justice to she who had taken him, you activated my spell. You were transported almost precisely one year into the future.”

  “No ...” whispered Cyclops.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Selene smirked. “You will have plenty of opportunity to confirm that what I am telling you is the truth. For now, all you need to know is that the balance of power on thi§ world has shifted somewhat in your absence.”

  “What happened to the Beast?” blurted out Iceman from somewhere behind Cyclops.

  Selene responded with an indifferent shrug. “What does it matter? You mortals live such short lives anyway, they are hardly worth mourning. The Beast has been dead for almost as long as you have been gone. The important thing is what he left behind. He bequeathed me a useful inheritance: the cure for a disease that has ravaged our kind.”

  Cyclops knew what she was talking about without having to ask. What he didn’t know was how he ought to feel about it. He was numbed by the news of the Beast’s passing: it had all happened so suddenly, he couldn’t take it in yet. But the revelation that Hank had achieved his fondest ambition, by finding a cure for the deadly Legacy Virus before his death, was a pinprick of hope in a descending veil of gloom. At the same time, the knowledge that that cure was in the hands of somebody as evil as Selene chilled him to the bone.

  He felt a familiar anxiety in the pit of his stomach: the sickly realization that he had lost control of events.

  For as long as he could remember, Scott Summers had known the importance of control. The red blasts of energy which emanated from his eyes could only be held in check by his own eyelids, or by a shield of ruby quartz such as that which made up the lens of his visor. His own mutant power was a potential threat to everybody around him, and he could never allow himself to forget that for a second.

  Control had become even more vital to him when Professor Charles Xavier had recruited him for his original X-Men team, and appointed him its field leader. As Cyclops, Scott had to remain forever alert, plan for every contingency. There was always somebody ready to take out a grudge against the embattled mutants: a xenophobic human, a mutant whose ideals clashed with Xavier's or perhaps just a megalomaniac bent on proving something to the world. An attack could come at any moment, and from any quarter.

  For Cyclops, then, there was nothing worse than this: not knowing where—or rather when-he was, not knowing what forces were stacked up against him. If Selene was telling the truth, if he really had been gone for a year, then he dreaded to think what might have happened in his absence. Given the Black Queen’s confident demeanor, he could only guess that the Beast’s death was just the first in a series of close-to-home tragedies about which he was already too late to do a thing.

  “I assume you didn’t use the cure for humanitarian purposes,” said Phoenix archly.

  “On the contrary, Ms. Grey,” smirked Selene, “there isn’t a person on Manhattan Island who doesn’t owe his or her life to me. I supply the medicine that keeps New York City alive.”

  “The entire population is infected with Legacy?” gasped Storm. “But of course,” said Selene as if it were obvious. With a playful glint in her eye, she added: “All eight hundred of them. Give or take a few, of course. It has become so difficult to keep track of all the new arrivals ... and departures.”

  Cyclops swallowed, fighting down a cry of disbelief.

  “You see, my friends, homo sapiens were never going to accept homo superior. Mutants could never have integrated into a human world: it is, sadly, only too natural for any species to rail against the one that is destined to replace it. So, I created a haven for our kind-a haven under my rule. I erected a mystical barrier around Manhattan Island, through which only mutants may pass.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Phoenix defiantly. “What about the humans who were already here? The Avengers... the Fantastic Four... they wouldn’t have let you do that!”

  “I have lived too long a life to be a fool, Ms. Grey. I waited until New York’s colorful champions were out of town before I made my move. No matter how great their powers, without the mutant x-factor in their genes, they cannot penetrate my shield.” Phoenix opened her mouth to protest again, but Selene waved a preemptory hand. “Oh, yes, some still opposed me. New York, it transpires, housed an impressive number of small-time vigilantes: Spider-Man, Daredevil and all the rest. And then there were the mutants, of course, whom my barrier did not repel: altruists such as X-Force and the remaining X-Men; those who came here alone to challenge me for their own purposes; the Avengers even put together an all-mutant team. I might have been defeated had all those forces deigned to work together.” She curled back her top lip to display her teeth, “Instead ... they died.”

  “What about the other humans?” asked Cyclops tersely. “The ones without powers?” His throat was dry, and he didn’t want to think about how many deaths of good friends had just been dismissed by Selene in a few words.

  “I am not needlessly vindictive, Mr. Summers. I allowed the human population of this island to leave in safety.” Selene’s white face darkened. “Unfortunately, many of them chose not to heed my warnings. I don’t think I have ever encountered such a stubborn herd in all my centuries. It took many deaths to drive out the last of them.” She smiled again, as if enjoying a pleasant memory. “Of course, their life energies were most welcome. It will be some time before I have to woriy about prolonging my own existence farther.” Then the smile was gone, and the Black Queen’s eyes hardened. “This is a city of mutants now. My city. And you, my friends, will fit in well.”

  Cyclops clenched his fists. “If you think we’re going to allow this twisted game of yours to continue, Selene, you’d better think again.”

  The Black Queen threw back her head and laughed. “You talk as if you have a choice. The truth is that, once you are infected, you will be trapped like the rest of my subjects, reliant upon regular does of my serum to survive.”

  She made a tiny gesture with one hand, and her demon helpers moved forward. Cyclops tensed, prepared for battle although his aching muscles complained that it was too soon. He rested two fingers of his yellow-gloved right hand upon the sensor in his palm, ready to open his visor and unleash his optic blasts. He scanned the approaching creatures: they came in all shapes and sizes, but each of their ghoulish faces was twisted into an expression of eager malice. Their skin was parchment-thin and lined with cracks, and their bared fangs and raised talons dripped with a clear liquid, which glinted in the flickering candlelight.

  “They’ve got poison on their teeth and claws,” warned Wolverine, sniffing the air. His highly developed sense of smell would have confirmed the evidence of his eyes.

  Cyclops nodded. “The Legacy Virus,” he surmised.

  The demons sprang, and their would-be victims—despite their weariness, both physical and mental-responded like the components of a well-honed machine. Cyclops let loose with a wide-angled blast, not powerful enough to cause much harm but calculated to stun as many of his foes as possible and leave them vulnerable to the others.

  Storm took to the air, the raised ceiling of the throne room working in her favor. From her vantage point out of the demons’ reach, she could take time to survey the battleground without fear of attack from behind, and deploy her elemental powers where they would do the most good. Her first fork of lightning sliced through the air and struck the foremost demon as it was aiming a swipe at Cyclops: it rocked on its heels, its eyes wide with surprise in its charred face, and then it crumpled.

  Wolverine favored a more direct approach, barreling into the demons’ front rank and bringing down four of the startled creatures like a row of dominoes. Two sets of three claws each—sheathed in adamantium, the hardest known metal-had extruded from th
e backs of his hands, and spots of viscous, black demon blood burst into the air as he lashed out. Wolverine didn't need much of an excuse to give in to his feral side, and the non-human nature of his opponents was enough.

  Rogue too ploughed forward, her fists flailing. Her particular mutant ability was that she temporarily acquired the physical and mental characteristics of anyone she touched with her bare skin. Her control over this power had lessened with time, and she had come to think of it as more of a curse than a blessing. She wore a hooded green bodysuit which left only her face exposed, lest she inadvertently brush against somebody and be overwhelmed by alien thoughts. However, she also possessed tremendous strength and the ability to fly-she had taken both from somebody a long time ago, and thanks to a terrible accident, they had never faded-which made her one of the X-Men’s most useful hand-to-hand fighters.

  Between them, the pair kept many of the demons occupied, but others poured around them and tried to surround their teammates. Storm conjured a wind to blow the right hand flank off its collective feet, while Iceman converted atmospheric moisture into a frozen barrier to the left. In the process, however, he left his back open to two demons who had fought their way past Rogue. In his ice form, protected by a thick coat of frozen armor, he might have been able to deflect their claws-but Cyclops wasn’t about to take that chance. He downed them with two rapid-fire optic blasts. Beside him, Phoenix’s green eyes flashed red as she thinned the odds against Rogue by tele-kinetically levitating four demons into the air. Bewildered and disoriented, thrashing their arms and legs, they were easy prey for Storm: the wind-rider cast them into the darkest corners of the room, from which they didn’t return.

  This was where long hours of training paid off. The demons were scrambling to reach their targets, pushing each other aside and trampling their fallen, but the X-Men were used to each other’s abilities and fighting styles, and well practiced in their own, and they worked in harmony. They didn’t even need to speak: Phoenix, a telepath as well as a telekinetic, opened a mental channel between them so that they could discuss tactics without being overheard.